Applied Digital Corporation (APLD) shares surged Monday after the cloud computing infrastructure company hit a significant milestone: bringing its first AI factory building online at full power, right on schedule.

What Happened: The company announced that the first building at its Polaris Forge 1 AI factory campus in Ellendale, North Dakota, is now running at its complete 100 MW critical IT load. This is one of three buildings Applied Digital is constructing on the campus as part of a 400 MW deployment contracted with CoreWeave under long-term lease agreements.

For context, these aren't your typical data centers. AI workloads require massive amounts of power and cooling, and getting these high-density systems operational is legitimately complex. Meeting the timeline matters because hyperscalers and AI companies need capacity yesterday, not next year.

"Bringing this first 100 MW building to full critical load on schedule reflects the engineering discipline and execution reliability our customers expect," said Todd Gale, chief development officer of Applied Digital.

"These AI Factory builds are complex, high-density systems, and delivering them at this speed and quality demonstrates the strength of our design, the rigor of our construction model, and our commitment to meeting the real deployment timelines of large-scale AI workloads."

The Bigger Picture: Applied Digital recently locked in a $5 billion lease with a U.S.-based investment grade hyperscaler for its Polaris Forge 2 campus. That brings the company's total contracted revenue across both campuses to around $16 billion. That's real money backing real infrastructure.

APLD Price Action: Applied Digital shares were trading up 10.86% at $23.38 at the time of publication on Monday.